Finally, a working GDB. After much pain and suffering, I've upgraded to GDB 6.1, which appears to be reasonably compatible with gcc 3.4. No more bizarre RTTI errors, and symbol lookup is now blazingly fast. Cool.

Precompiled headers with GCC 3.4. Microsoft is still ahead here, I think--even with precompiled headers and a well-designed header layout, GCC 3.4 build times are painfully slow compared to MSVC 6. (I'll know about MSVC.NET when port this new code over.)

It seems that GCC does a lot of work at template instantiation time, which means that every std::map<T> in your non-precompiled headers hits you where it hurts.

C++ feelings. My love-hate relationship with C++ has been leaning towards "hate" recently, as I've been doing lots of complicated data structures and learning where shared_ptr just doesn't cut it. But I've laid the groundwork for a simple garbage collector (which I needed to write anyway, for use with the code I'm generating), and I feel about 500% better about my code base.